IBM's Watson For Business: The $1 Billion Siri Slayer
IBM is unveiling their new Watson for Business on Thursday, a $1 billion project devoted to bringing big data to every educational institution, pharmaceutical firm, and publishing house in America--and they're offering more than $100 million in venture capital to developers.
IBM is announcing the launch of a new, $1 billion Watson Business Group, $100 million in venture capital earmarks toward new Watson apps, and a shiny new Watson headquarters in New York's East Village neighborhood on Thursday. The news means that IBM has essentially made a $1 billion bet on Watson, the big data-cloud service hybrid which famously competed on Jeopardy and, more importantly, saves lives. If it succeeds, IBM will have the means to provide Watson's services to every American workplace.
Put another way, IBM wants to transform Watson into a Siri for business. The platform is designed for users to ask Watson questions, with Watson giving answers--such as medical diagnoses for hard-to-diagnose diseases, or the likely outcome of business decisions--on the spot. The iconic tech multinational has excelled for decades at enterprise services, but has had much less success targeting home users (just remember how IBM PC clones became de rigeur in the 1980s and the failure of OS/2, but the new Watson Business Group appears to be aimed at making Watson as ubiquitous as IBM's computer equipment. Stephen Gold, vice president of IBM Watson Solutions, tells Fast Company that over 2000 employees will work in support of the new Watson Business Group, which will preside over an app ecosystem where over 750 applicants have expressed interest in developing Watson-based apps using $100 million in future IBM equity investment.
Gold says a big part of this push grew from Watson being used in industries that do not currently use much big data or analytics. Two new Watson products, IBM Watson Discovery Advisor and IBM Watson Analytics Advisor, target a mass business audience. According to an IBM press release, the Discovery Advisor takes aim at publishing, education, and health care. And Analytics Advisor could be a game-changer for IBM if it works as promised: The software “allows business users to send natural language questions and raw data sets into the cloud, for Watson to crunch, uncover, and visualize insights; without the need for advanced analytics training. After analyzing the data, Watson will deliver results to its users through graphic representations that are easy to understand, interact with, and share with colleagues; all in a matter of minutes.”
The 2,000+ employees of the Watson Business Group will be headquartered at 51 Astor in New York's East Village. Twitter is reportedly looking at office space in the building and the headquarters of AOL and the Huffington Post (and soon Facebook) are directly across the street....MORE
